Many people confuse the terms sex and gender. To make matters even more confusing, linguists use gender in more than one way. Let’s define these terms precisely so that we can be clear about what we mean.

Sex

Definition: A set of biological attributes in humans and animals, including hormone level and expression, reproductive anatomy, chromosomes, and gene expression (CIHR 2023).

Categories: Sex is usually divided into male and female, but there is variation in how these different biological attributes are expressed, including some who have attributes of both sexes or neither (Fausto-Sterling 2000).

Property of: People and animals.

(Personal) gender

Definition: The socially constructed roles, behaviours, and expressions of a person based on how people perceive themselves and interact with others (CIHR 2023).

Categories: Some common gender categories include woman, man, girl, boy, or non-binary person (CIHR 2023).

Property of: People and maybe animals.

Semantic gender

Definition: Nouns that refer to people or animals sometimes carry semantic gender, which means that the personal gender of the person it refers to (or the sex of an animal) is encoded in the meaning of the word. This includes words like sister and brother, for which the semantic gender is part of the root word, but also words like duke and duchess, which include semantic gender in a separate morpheme. An increasing number of non-binary forms are being coined, such as nibling for the child of a sibling.

Categories: Depending on the context, these may be referred to as male, female, and unspecified, or as masculine, feminine, and epicene.

Property of: Words, mostly nouns. Morphemes encoding primarily semantic gender are usually derivational morphemes.

Grammatical gender

Definition: Grammatical gender refers to noun classes in grammar. Unlike semantic gender, these noun classes may trigger agreement in other words or determine which inflectional paradigm a word uses.

Categories: In some languages, including many Indo-European languages, grammatical gender has distinctions between masculine and feminine or between masculine, feminine, and neuter. Other languages, including many Algonquian languages, have distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns. Languages in the Bantu family have approximately 16 noun classes (half singular and half plural), and all humans belong to the same noun class, as we saw for SiSwati above in example (15).

Property of: Words, mostly nouns. Morphemes encoding grammatical gender are usually inflectional morphemes.

In English, the pronoun you is used for both the singular and plural, but this was not always the case. You started out as a plural pronoun, and the pronouns thou (nominative), thee (accusative), and thy (genitive) were the singular pronouns. Here are some examples of the archaic singular pronoun from the Shakespeare play Hamlet.

(11) a. Thou seest the heavens (Act II Scene IV)

b. I’ll give thee a wind. (Act I Scene III)

c. …and everyone did bear thy praises in his kingdom’s great defence (Act I Scene III)

In Early Modern English, at the time of Shakespeare, you could be used as a plural pronoun or it could be used as a singular pronoun in more formal contexts and to show respect to the addressee. Over time, the polite you form became more and more common. Some prescriptivists didn’t like this change and complained about it, as illustrated by the quote below.

Now, in modern English, you is firmly established as a singular pronoun, replacing thou/thee/thy entirely. Some dialects have even coined new plural pronouns such as y’all or youse to re-establish the distinction between second person singular and plural.

Using the plural pronoun to show respect to single addressees is also used in other languages. For example the plural second person pronoun vous is used as a polite form to address single addressees in French, instead of the singular second person pronoun tu, which, depending on the dialect, is used only for close friends and family.

The pronoun they also originated as a plural pronoun but has been used as a singular pronoun in certain contexts since at least the 1400s (Balhorn 2004). Since the other third person singular pronouns specify gender or animacy, singular they is often used when the gender is unknown or irrelevant, as in (12).

(12) a. (Seeing an unidentified distant figure ) They‘re waving at us.

b. (After answering a phone call) They had the wrong number.

(Bjorkman 2017: 1)

Singular they was also used when it referred back to a noun modified by a quantifer, even if the gender was specified, as shown through the historical examples in (13).

(13) a. Shakespeare (A Comedy of Errors, 1623)

There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend

b. Austen (Pride and Prejudice, 1813)

Both sisters were uncomfortable enough. Each felt for the other, and of course for themselves.

(Bjorkman 2017: 3)

More recently, they has begun to be used as a singular pronoun for specific people whose gender is known. Some modern English speakers accept neither the sentences in (14) or (15). Some accept the sentences in (14) but not (15), and some accept all of the sentences in both (14) and (15). Sentences that are grammatical for some people but not all are marked with a percentage sign (%). Subscript letters, called co-indexes, are included beside nouns to show that they refer to the same entity.

(14) a. %The professor_i said they_i cancelled the exam.

b. %Our eldest child_i broke their_i leg.

c. %I’ll let my cousin_i introduce themselves_i.

(Bjorkman 2017: 2)

(15) a. %Janet_i said they_i cancelled the exam.

b. %Thomas_i broke their_i leg.

c. %I’ll let my sister_i introduce themselves_i.

(Bjorkman 2017: 2)

Several different researchers have suggested that the different judgment patterns for sentences like those in (14)-(15) are the result of a few small differences in people’s grammar. Bjorkman (2017) argues that some people have a grammar that requires referential nouns to be specified for gender, even if it is not morphologically marked, while others have a grammar that allows nouns to be unspecified for gender. Konnelly and Cowper (2020) argue that there are three distinct grammars for they in competition, representing different stages of a change in progress, as described in (15).

(15) a. Stage 1 singular they: (quantified antecedent, or antecedent of unknown/irrelevant gender), as shown in (12)-(13)

b. Stage 2 singular they: antecedent of known gender, but ungendered description//name, as in (14)

c. Stage 3 singular they: antecedent of any gender, no restriction on description/name, as in (15)

Camilliere et al. (2021) did a sociolinguistic study that shows that people’s linguistic behaviour does cluster into the three distinct patterns proposed by Konnelly and Cowper. How people rate singular they in different contexts is correlated with social attitudes toward transgender people and prescriptivist language, as well as age and social distance between the speaker and the referent of the pronoun.

Some people feel like gendered pronouns like she or he do not fit them and may request that others refer to them by using they. We can show respect for them by using the pronouns that they request. However, sometimes even people who want to use singular they to refer to specific people may struggle to because their grammar is more restrictive, and they may find the change in usage difficult to acquire at first. The good news, though, is that learning and internalizing a new grammar is entirely possible with practice! Kirby Conrod, a linguist who uses they pronouns, gives some tips on how to do that in their blog.